Resistance and Accommodation: Protestant Responses to Nazism Mike Radcliffe University of North Florida
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University of North Florida UNF Digital Commons All Volumes (2001-2008) The sprO ey Journal of Ideas and Inquiry 2007 Resistance and Accommodation: Protestant Responses to Nazism Mike Radcliffe University of North Florida Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unf.edu/ojii_volumes Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Suggested Citation Radcliffe, Mike, "Resistance and Accommodation: Protestant Responses to Nazism" (2007). All Volumes (2001-2008). 40. http://digitalcommons.unf.edu/ojii_volumes/40 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The sprO ey Journal of Ideas and Inquiry at UNF Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Volumes (2001-2008) by an authorized administrator of UNF Digital Commons. For more information, please contact Digital Projects. © 2007 All Rights Reserved Resistance and Accommodation: call society is in fact a product of our own making, only existing because we exist, and Protestant Responses to Nazism only persisting because we collectively agree that it should. Berger develops his corollary Mike Radcliffe about religion’s distinctive place by arguing that it functions as a “sacred canopy” – a Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Theophilus C. Prousis, socially constructed order of reality that Professor of History embraces supernatural power as central. It is called a canopy because it is protective – Among Germany’s Christians in the those who embrace it are shielded from the early twentieth century, Protestants were the 1 terror of chaos, the insanity of a world most prevalent. Protestantism was bound to without meaning and order.4 There is a Germany’s history and society in the man of problem, however; as Berger puts it, “All Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century socially constructed worlds are inherently Protestant Reformation, and the Protestant precarious.”5 And because they are church had since been a key force in precarious, they require social processes to constructing a moral universe for the German maintain their stability. One such process is nation into the twentieth century. However, what Berger calls “legitimation”: “socially Hitler’s conscious construction of a new objectivated ‘knowledge’ that serves to moral order directly challenged that universe explain the social order”6 or the social process by virtue of nationalism, allegiance to the by which ideology is used to give legitimacy Führer, racism, and eventually a war of to extant social institutions (i.e. family, conquest and genocide. His aim was total government, academia). Berger goes on to say control, but “Nazi claims of success in that “religion has been the historically most converting the nation to their set of values… widespread and effective instrumentality of were exaggerated,” argues Alan Bullock, legitimation… by locating [social institutions] “The clearest expression of this was the split 2 within a sacred and cosmic frame of in the Protestant churches.” Nazism reference.”7 In addition to many other social confronted Germany’s spiritual leaders with a institutions, German Protestantism upheld and difficult choice: they could either capitulate supported the secular government – both in and marry Protestantism with Nazism, as did the early twentieth century and in the four the German Christians, or they could hundred years since the Protestant explicitly reject Nazism and face persecution Reformation. The implications under Nazism at the hands of the state, as did the Confessing are disturbing: Robert P. Ericksen and Church. Susannah Heschel write, “Most important, Peter Berger, an eminent scholar on [the clergy’s] role involved moral suasion: the sociology of religion, posits that “Every Through the support for Nazi policies human society is an enterprise of world- articulated by many religious leaders, building. Religion occupies a distinctive place ordinary Germans were reassured that those in this enterprise.”3 That is, the complex web of relationships and functional roles that we 4 Berger argues that the sacred’s even deeper 1 Andrew Chandler, ed., The Moral Imperative; New opposition than that of the profane is that of chaos, for Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist “profane” supposes a universe of meaning where its Germany 1933-1945 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview opposite is the sacred, but chaos supposes no meaning Press, 1998), 3. and provides no organizational strategy for experience. 2 Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New 5 Berger, 26. York: Vintage Books, 1993), 319. 6 By “objectivated,” Berger means the process by 3 Peter L. Berger, “The Sacred Canopy” in Sociology which certain ideas take on the force of truth by of Religion: A Reader, Susanne C. Monahan, et al., society’s collective agreement that they are true. Ibid., eds. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 26. Inc., 2001), 23. 7 Ibid., policies did not violate the tenets of Christian Reich, argues that in this syncretism of faith and morality.”8 Christianity, Nazism dominated because it When Hitler was elected Supreme entailed the most significant real world Chancellor in 1933, the Protestant church yet pressures (i.e., arrest and murder of had a long-standing history of compliance and dissenters), whereas Christianity, their submission to the German state. Luther construction of otherworldly pressures (i.e., himself had been a strong advocate of salvation and damnation), could be more apoliticism and in his day “[t]he role of the easily molded to suit the needs created by Church… lay simply in the ministry of the Nazism’s demands.12 Here the social process sacraments and the preaching of the gospel. of legitimation overrode theological and The prince was the summus episcopus, with philosophical consistency and replaced power over the property, ecclesiastical Christian morality with what Claudia Koonz jurisdiction and doctrine of the church.”9 has called the “Nazi Conscience.” German Protestantism thus favored hierarchy As early as 1935, congregations were and authoritarian government and thus it moving for the expulsion of Jews from shared Hitler’s pain in Germany’s 1918 defeat churches that putatively should have been and the subsequent, weak Weimar Republic. ethnically German; the expelled would have For both the German people at large and its to form their own ethnically-boundaried Protestants, liberal democracy was associated Jewish congregations.13 In 1939, German with defeat and shattered pride, whereas the Christian leaders signed the Godesberg authoritarian Kaiser was associated with Declaration, an ecclesiological document that strength and patriotism. “For many “aimed to transform the Protestant church into Protestants, Hitler’s promise of a structural a tool of racial policy.”14 German Christians regeneration of the nation, his call for thus avidly supported Hitler and the Nazi sacrifice and unity, met the need of a state, including its racial discrimination, the revitalized faith that the churches could no war effort, and even the Final Solution. longer satisfy from their own enfeebled Unfortunately for them, however, the Nazi resources.”10 state was uninterested in them, as at least The German Christians, those Nazis and Protestant radicals like Dietrich Protestants who combined Christian theology Bonhoeffer recognized the absolute with Nazi racial ideology, most explicitly incompatibility of Nazism and Christianity.15 demonstrated this church-state legitimation Koonz notes that the Nazis “spurned their and collusion. They committed themselves to collaboration.”16 the political supremacy of Nazi Germany by Hitler had no respect for Christianity adding “nature and history”11 to what counted beyond the institutional stability of the as divine revelation. This stance resulted in a Vatican. “Taken to its logical extreme,” he church whose organizing principle was Nazi said, “Christianity would mean the systematic racism rather than biblical theology. Doris L. cultivation of human failure.”17 Ever Bergen, in her work Twisted Cross: The politically keen, however, he understood that German Christian Movement and the Third ninety percent of his subjects were 8 Robert P. Ericksen and Heschel, Susannah, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1999), 4. 12 Ibid., 11. 9 Chandler, 3-4. 13 Ibid., 24. 10 Bullock, 220. 14 Ibid., 24 11 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German 15 Ibid., 1. Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 16 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 2003), 213. 1996),11. 17 Ibid., 381. Christians,18 and before 1939, “Hitler inclusion of nature and history as part of virtually never mentioned three controversial God’s revelation to humanity: themes that shaped his political agenda: crude anti-Semitism, contempt for Our protest… must be directed Christianity, and preparation for a war of fundamentally against the fact conquest.”19 Instead of expressing his (which is the source of all individual contempt, he spoke of “Positive Christianity,” errors) that, beside the Holy meaning “something vague and undoctrinal… Scriptures as the unique source of love of neighbor, social welfare, and so on… revelation, the German-Christians It was useful to put it in, because it committed affirm the German nationhood, its nobody to anything and at the same time history and its contemporary sounded attractive to all who were against political situation as a second source atheism, blasphemy,